The fundamental processing steps for color photographic materials are generally a color development step and a desilvering step. In the color development step, the light-exposed silver halide in the color photographic material is reduced by a color-developing agent to form silver and at the same time the oxidized color-developing agent reacts with the color-forming couplers in the color photographic materials to form dye images. The silver formed is oxidized by a bleaching agent in the subsequent desilvering step and further converted by the action of a fixing agent into a soluble silver complex, which is dissolved away. Acutal processing steps for color photographic materials further include various auxiliary steps such as a hardening step, a stop step, an image-stabilizing step, a water wash step, etc., for keeping good photographic and physical qualities of the color images formed and improving the storage stability of the color images.
Recently, it has been keenly desired to quicken the processing of color photographic materials, that is, to shorten the processing time. To accomplish this, it is particularly important to try to shorten the processing time for the desilvering step because this step takes about half of the total processing time of the aforesaid processing steps.
For meeting such a need, a bleach-fix (blix) solution containing an aminopolycarboxylic acid ferric complex salt and a thiosulfate as described in German Patent 866,605 is known as a means for shortening the processing time for the desilvering step. However, when an aminopolycarboxylic acid ferric complex salt originally having weak oxidative power (bleaching power) coexists with a thiosulfate having reducing power, the bleaching power of the complex salt is reduced so much that desilvering of a high speed and high silver-containing color photographic material for photographing (in camera use) cannot be sufficiently performed, and thus the blix solution as described above is unsuitable for practical use.
On the other hand, as a method for increasing the bleaching power, it has been proposed to add a bleach accelerator such as the mercapto compound, etc., as described, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,893,858, etc., to a bleach or blix bath or the prebath thereof but the effect of the bleach accelerator is not always sufficient in the processing using a conventional bleach bath and fix bath.
Also, a method of quickening desilvering of color photograhic light-sensitive materials by performing a blix step after a bleach step is described in Japanese Patent Application (OPI) No. 75352/86 (the term "OPI" as used herein refers to a "published unexamined Japanese patent application") (corresponding to European Patent Publication No. A176,056).
However, in the case of quickening the desilvering step for color photographic materials, the desilvering property of a bleach bath or blix bath is reduced by development inhibitor-releasing (DIR) couplers contained in color photographic light-sensitive materials.